Digital property is an evolving economic and legal concept that challenges modern technological and legal frameworks. Generally, digital property refers to any digital data that has some manner of ownership attached to it, for example, through copyright protection, trade secret protection, etc. In a typical copyright scenario, copyrights in an original work of authorship (e.g., a photograph) may be attributed to the author (e.g., the photographer). Furthermore, the work may be embodied in the form of digital data (e.g., a digital image file), the copying, distribution, derivation, etc. of which are exclusively within the rights of the author. Accordingly, each instance of the digital data (e.g., each copy of the digital image file) is an instance of the digital property of that author.
The exclusive rights associated with digital property may be transferred (e.g., assigned to another) or licensed for use by others. For example, the photographer may license another party to use a digital image on the party's website, subject to certain limitations to which the parties have agreed. However, once the digital image file is copied and transferred out of the author's control, there is risk the digital image file can be lost or corrupted. Accordingly, Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are continually being developed to facilitate technological and legal control digital property rights and protections against loss or corruption of the digital property.
However, existing DRM approaches to protect against loss or corruption of data have proven inadequate, costly, invasive, and inconvenient to the digital property owners and/or the licensed users. For example, a large digital music vending service recently announce its termination of music vending activities, raising the possibility that customers of the service may lose the rights and ability to listen to the music that they “purchased” (e.g., licensed).
Accordingly, digital property ownership remains exposed to the possibility of loss or corruption of the digital content, and so, consumers remain suspicious of protection schemes for digital property. These incompatible factors amplify the transactional costs associated with distributing, protecting, and storing digital content.